First time NAS buyer with limited IT skills

[Enquiries]

Hello,
I've recently started to learn about NAS storage. One of my drives died with all my kids photos etc. Total nightmare. We also stream a lot of movies as a family and my wife and I work from home. I've watched a lot of your videos over the past few days, but I can't make up my mind as to what is the best NAS for us. I don't mind paying a bit more for extra RAM or to get a future proofed system that I won't regret buying in 2 years time, but I can't justify paying too much. At the moment, I'm thinking the Synology DiskStation DS923+ I really don't know if I'm paying too much. It'd be great to get your expert feedback to help me. Cheers, Rich

[ed]

Hi! It's great to hear that you're interested in getting a NAS for your storage and streaming needs. The Synology DiskStation DS923+ is a great option for a NAS, but it might be a bit overkill for your current needs.

If you're looking for a more cost-effective option that can still handle your family's streaming and storage needs, the Synology DiskStation DS423+ would be a good choice. It has the same processor as the DS920+ and comes with 2GB of RAM (which can be upgraded to 6GB), which should be sufficient for your needs.

When it comes to hard drives, I would recommend going with drives designed for NAS usage, such as Seagate IronWolf or Western Digital Red drives. They are designed to be more reliable and durable for the 24/7 usage that NAS drives require.

In terms of connection, I would recommend using a wired connection for the best performance. The DS423+ comes with 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports, so you can connect it directly to your router for the fastest possible speeds.

[Grra]

Hi Rich!

You and many others (me included) often get blinded by the concept of "future proofing" something.

If you are new to NAS then decide what you like to use now, and maybe within the next 6 months.
Don't think to much about what happens several years down the line.

If you do the above after having watched and sought input about what you need now the rest will take care of itself.

5 years down the line if you find that you want to do more things with your NAS you would probably want to buy what is new at that time instead.

Also bummer with your photos.

You have probably heard or read this many times: "Raid is not Backup".
The ones that most often repeat this are people that have suffered data loss on their NAS even though running Raid-5 (or any other raid level that provides redundancy).

So having a NAS running with disk redundancy will protect you (in most cases) from mechanical failure of one or two drives it is not backup.

If you have, for example, a personal or family account of Microsoft's cloud offering you can setup syncing to the cloud and have a backup that way.
Some reading of the manual will be needed so that you understand the syncing and what gets deleted where and when - some of it configurable.

So returning to the future proofing (perhaps contradicting myself a tiny bit), the only thing I would recommend is to perhaps lean towards NAS units that will allow you to expand the RAM in the future.